With British Guns in Italy eBook

The old Austria is dead, and from her grave, which
Italian hands have dug, are rising up new nations,
the future comrades of the old nations and of Italy,
who in these bloody years has grown from youth to full
manhood. It has been said that a nation is a friendship,
and the common life of nations in the future must
also be a friendship, necessarily less intimate but
in no way less real. The youth of the world must
never be called to swim again, with old age on its
back, through seas of needless death to the steep
and distant cliffs of military victory. There
must be no more secret plots, nor seeming justification
of plots, by little groups of elderly men against
the lives and happiness of young men everywhere.
The world must be made safe for justice and for youth.

* * * *
*

Youth was rejoicing that night in Italy, when the
war against Austria ended. And not youth only,
nor Italians only. The British troops loudly
and healthily and almost riotously sang also, all the
temporary soldiers and nearly all the regulars.
Yet here and there were gloom, and drab, wet blankets,
trying to make smoulder those raging fires of joy.
In a few officers’ Messes, especially among the
more exalted units, men of forty years and more croaked
like ravens over their impending loss of pay and rank,
Brigadier Generals who would soon be Colonels again,
and Colonels who would soon be Majors. To have
been, through long uneventful unmental years, a peace-time
soldier puts the imagination in jeopardy and is apt
to breed a self-centred fatuity, which the inexperienced
may easily mistake for deliberate naughtiness.
Yet these brave men, who hate peace and despise civilians,
have many human qualities. They are generally
polite to women, and they are kind to animals and to
those of their inferiors who show them proper deference
and salute them briskly. It is not always easy
to judge them fairly. And that night one did not
try. They jarred intolerably. They seemed
a portent, though in truth they were something less.
They found themselves left alone to their private
griefs, ruminating regretfully over the golden age
that had suddenly ended, gazing into the blackness
of a future without hope.

CHAPTER XLI

IN THE EUGANEAN HILLS

November 12th, 1918

It is all over. For a few days it seemed possible
that we might be sent northward, through redeemed
Trento and over the Brenner and the crest of the Alps
and down through Innsbruck, to open a new front against
Germany along the frontier of Bavaria. But that
will not be necessary now. It is all over.